Philosophy and the Joyful Life

Monthly Archives: December 2011

Sikhism and Jainism are two smaller but significant Indic religions, which like Buddhism split off from Hinduism. In addition to their shared cultural origins (including belief in the Karma, Rebirth, and Liberation of the soul) they also both put a particularly strong emphasis on universal love. In what follows I will summarise the most interesting things I’ve learned about Sikhism. Read the rest of this entry →

Traditional display for Diwali, ‘the festival of light’ celebrated in all Indic religions.

Jainism and Sikhism are two smaller but significant Indic religions, which like Buddhism split off from Hinduism. In addition to their shared cultural origins (including belief in the Karma, Rebirth, and Liberation of the soul) they also both put a particularly strong emphasis on universal love. In this post I have a look at Jainism.[1] Read the rest of this entry →

To know what Marx meant by ‘alienation’ is not straightforward because there is no single phenomena that he identified as alienating. Our colloquial usage of ‘alienation’ often refers to a feeling, but for Marx it need not be felt at all. Concepts of alienation were important in the idealist tradition contemporaneous to Marx, and were conceived of as the coming apart of something, the separation of essence from existence. Read the rest of this entry →

An Evaluation of the Positions of Hart and Dworkin on the Role of Judges Faced with Hard Cases

‘Hard cases’ is a general name for those cases where the law is not clear as to who the judge should rule in favour of, which are normally due to a lack of relevant precedent. This role of judges is controversial among philosophers because if there are such gaps in the law it would appear that when decisions are made, the substance of the new ‘law’ created would be chosen by them. Read the rest of this entry →

The problem of qualitative change is how an object that has a particular property at one time can be numerically identical with an object that does not have that property at a different time without violating the principle of the indiscernability of identicals.[1] (This is distinct from the problem of mereological change: can object that has particular parts at one time be likewise identical with different parts at a different time?) There would be a very significant philosophical conclusion should we be unable to solve this, namely that we cannot make literally correct statements of the form ‘the banana changed from green to yellow’. Read the rest of this entry →

An Assessment of the Positivist Critique of the Natural Law Claim that Law and Morality are Inseparable

The central claim in the positivist approach to the place of morality is that the law draws its authority from the legitimacy of the law-making body and that this has nothing to do with morality. So long as certain conditions (varying between philosophers) are fulfilled, such as that the laws this body makes are generally respected, that they are made known for citizens to learn if they wish, and that the specific law was passed according to the correct procedures in that system, it qualifies as an authoritative law. Another way of putting this is that it is the form of the law, solely those factors that are extrinsic to that law itself which determine its authority. Read the rest of this entry →

Is Aristotle’s Doctrine of the Mean A Plausible Guide To Moral Goodness?

Introduction

Aristotle’s (384 BC – 322 BC) doctrine of the mean has a privileged place in one of the grand moral traditions, that of virtue ethics. Virtue ethics retains a widespread influence today, particularly via its thirteenth century formulation by St. Thomas Aquinas, which remains at the core of the moral teaching of the Catholic Church, and via its twentieth century reunion with the secular mainstream of moral philosophy through the work of several Catholic scholars, particularly Alasdair MacIntyre.[1] This essay endorses virtue ethics and argues that the doctrine of the mean is a plausible guide to moral goodness, but is not by itself adequate as a guide to all-things-considered moral rightness. Read the rest of this entry →